Miles goes into frenemy territory

Continuing my Lois McMaster Bujold adventures, I read Cetaganda, the next installment in the Vorkosigan Saga. This one follows Miles and his much handsomer, much dumber cousin Ivan as they go on a diplomatic mission to the Cetagandan Empire, which until very recently has been a recurring enemy of Barrayar.

Miles and Ivan were actually not sent to Cetaganda on any mission other than their public one, which was to represent and deliver a gift from Emperor Gregor at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress Lisbet Degtiar. However, a very sensitive intelligence mission attacks them before they’ve even docked properly at the Cetagandan shuttle station (getting them to dock improperly is the opening salvo of the plot, in fact). Miles then spends a tight 300 pages trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and which Cetagandan nob is trying to frame Barrayar for their own treason so they can start another war, which, while Barrayar has won the last couple wars against Cetaganda, they’d still really like to take a good generation-long break from. Miles’ ability to do intel/counter-intel is initially hampered by being in a strange civilization where he doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t know how stuff works, but through sheer enfant-terrible-whiz-kid-ness and plot armor a mile thick, he manages to avoid dying (multiple times) for long enough to talk his way into cultivating some allies, spinning some theories, and gaining access to all sorts of very off-limits-to-barbarian-outworlders spaces in Cetagandan culture.

The Cetagandans are master… well, eugenicists, basically, although (as far as we can see) they are less about murdering undesirables (for genetics reasons, anyway; they’re real big on it as part of regular imperial expansionism) than about tinkering with gene lines to create an incredibly baroque and insular aristocratic power structure, kind of like how all European royalty are cousins with each other, except since it’s being done by Science instead of the old-fashioned way they can avoid any unfortunate Habsburg chins and suchlike. The upper class of genetically on-purpose Cetagandans are called the haut, and they are all very hot, and the women float around in little force-bubbles when in public so no one can see them. The sort of gentry or lower-aristocratic class, from which most of the military brass is drawn, are called the ghem, and the highest honor a ghem-lord can win from the Emperor, even higher than the Order of Merit, is an haut-lady wife. The other big division of labor in Cetagandan society is gender, with the women in charge of the genome project and the men in charge of externally facing Imperial politics. This division does not in any way usurp the class solidarity of the haut, of course.

All this is a bit baffling to Miles, who comes from Barrayar, a place where power is very firmly in the hands of Men Who Can Kill Lots of People. Fortunately, as befits a protagonist, Miles is a quick study, and has the benefit of being constantly underestimated. (He is, in fact, so underestimated that at one point the as-yet-unknown antagonist sees Miles poking around and assumes that Ivan must be the one directing him, and promptly kidnaps Ivan, who is a dumbass who doesn’t know shit about what’s going on.)

In very classic Miles fashion, our hero spends nearly as much time and effort trying to avoid reporting his mission to his superiors–either the Barrayaran ambassador, or the protocol officer, who is actually the embassy’s ImpSec commander–because he doesn’t want them to take the mission away from him and send it up the chain of command, which is what would probably happen given that Miles is a 22-year-old lieutenant with no subordinates.

This gets increasingly difficult as the shenanigans heighten. A low-ranking, broke young ghem-lord takes a sort of half-assed interest in the Barrayaran oddities and plays a series of minor xenophobic pranks on them that are sometimes actual assassination attempts, which he doesn’t seem to be aware of. Ivan develops a reputation among the ghem-women while Miles does detective work and keeps causing minor diplomatic incidents by being in places he shouldn’t be. An Imperial servant is murdered and it is staged to look like a suicide, and Miles tries to gently direct the Cetagandan security officer in charge of the investigation to do actual investigating instead of wrapping it up quickly and quietly, which he is under significant pressure to do. This works because Miles, insufferably protagonist-y as he can be, is certainly not The Guy With the Only Brain Cell–in fact, in this particular book he seems to be surrounded mostly by very smart and competent people, except for Ivan and Lord Yenaro (and even they are competent at some things. Yenaro’s competency, unfortunately, is perfumery, not political intrigue).

Overall verdict is pretty in keeping with the rest of the Saga: a little tropey but a lot of fun.